Hyakkano – 07 – Love is the Drug

Rentarou has a horny girlfriend in Hakari, a tsundere in Karane, a shy bookworm in Shizuka, and a logical, cool beauty in Nano. We’ve seen her in the OP and ED, and this week it’s finally time to introduce Soulmate #5: the eccentric chemistry buff, Yakuzan Kusuri. He’s being led down the hall by the others when he and Kusuri happen to lock eyes in passing.

However, their formal introduction isn’t without a few bumps, as he initially made eye contact with a voluptuous beauty, and when he visits the chemistry lab he finds cute tiny girl akin to Shizuka instead. We soon learn that while Kusuri loves Rentaro, drugs are a close second, as evidenced when she has him drink a drug that magnetizes him.

She drinks the opposite polarity magnet drug and ends up sticking to him, which is when Rentarou learns something else: due to her obsession with experimentation, Kusuri abhors wasting time leaving the lab to use the restroom…so she wears diapers.

When the magnetization wears off, Kusuri shows Rentarou a number of other colorful drugs, then confesses to him and asks to go out with him. When he starts wretching into the sink she’s crestfallen, but he clarifies that he doesn’t want to be under the influence of drugs when he accepts her feelings.

That said, in addition to the magnet drug, his tea contained a love drug, which affects him adversely and causes Bocchi-like convulsions. Thinking fast, Kusuri takes the neutralizing drug into her mouth then administers it to him with a kiss.

He recovers, but to Kusuri’s shock he still seems to be infatuated with her, turning them both beet red. She prostrates herself and again asks to go out with him, but both hair and body start to grow until she take on the busty form of the woman he first saw. Naturally, they’re one and the same.

The neutralization drug also cancelled out the failed immortality drug she takes to shrink to a smaller size, shorter hair, and improves her vision, which makes her lab work easier. Rentaro learns that she’s actually a third-year and thus his senpai. But now that he knows this is the girl he locked eyes with, he officially accepts her as his new girlfriend.

If Kusuri has a problem being one of Rentarou’s five girlfriends, she doesn’t bring it up, and the others are used to this by now, so she’s cordially welcomed. She’s even brought personalized drugs for her new polycule partners. Talk of a bust-enhancing drug angers Karane until she hears how Rentarou described her to Kusuri (slender, beautiful, cute and shy).

When given a “hot stuff” drug, Hakari imagines her already ample bosom and bum growing to absurd size (with visuals akin a similar scenario in the 2000 horror film Faust: Love of the Damned of all things) but instead the drug makes her skin literally hot—so hot it melts off her clothes and underwear. As Kusuri puts it, nothing’s hotter than your birthday suit.

Rentarou comes to the rescue with his used P.E. uniform, the smell of which Hakari enjoys a bit too much (though she still rocks the bell out of it). Thinking of her love of fiction, Kusuri provides Shizuka a drug that gives her fantasy bunny ears that are sensitive in a specific way Rentarou doesn’t fully grasp.

Nano takes a drug that lengthens her hair and make sit prehensile, allowing her to grab Rentarou and draw him close with a kiss. She has other doses, but warns a side effect is baldness. Rentarou will love Nano with or without hair, but admits he loves her hair too, so Nano ditches the extra doses, in an instance of logic giving way to love.

Once all the drugs wear off, the newly-formed sextet some afternoon tea. Kusuri provided to different kinds for Rentarou and the others, but when he insists she go to the bathroom when she has a call of nature, she trusts them not to get them mixed up.

However, while she assumed the girls would consider the slender, “chic” red Thermos their tea, they pick the “utilitarian” blue Thermos because it’s bigger and there are more of them. So when she returns, the other four girls end up sipping tea meant for Rentarou.

This isn’t just a different blend: it’s a potion that was intended to give Rentarou an uncontrollable urge to kiss her. As the girls turn feral one by one, she further explains that it’s not meant for girls, and turns them into vicious “kiss zombies” with superhuman strength and speed.

When all hell starts breaking loose, Kusuri is again crestfallen, thinking it’s happening again … I’m screwing everything up. We see a flashback to everyone in her chem club eventually abandoning her, likely due to her eccentricity. But what she’ll come to learn is that everyone in this group is weird in their own way, and once you’re Rentarou’s girlfriend, he’ll never let you go.

The task before him and Kusuri is to administer the neutralizing drug to all four girls within one hour. If they don’t, they’ll be in this kiss-ravenous frenzy for the rest of their days. The episode ends on a cliffhanger and postcard memory, but I think I already know the solution: Rentarou simply has to have a mouthful of neutralizing drug for when each of the girls inevitably kisses him.

Kusuri marks yet another stretch into heightened reality and absurdity, as her drugs are essentially magic potions. That said, she’s not simply kooky comic relief, as I empathized with her desire to share her passion with others and avoiding loneliness, and her love for Rentarou (and his for her) is as genuine and endearing as everyone else’s.

The question is, will we proceed with just these five girlfriends for the remainder of the cour, or will the show switch up the OP and ED and introduce a sixth, seventh, or more? There are ninety-five soulmates to go, after all!

The Apothecary Diaries – 07 – A Hairpin Away from Home

Unlike most teenagers, Maomao is not accustomed to sleeping in until noon, but when she does, she dreams of home; specifically, while on a walk with her elderly father. Gyokuyou and the other ladies-in-waiting insisted she take some time off after being poisoned, not understanding that it was an honor, not an ordeal, due to her poison kink.

When she insists on working, Gyokuyou has her meet with Gaoshun, who’d been loitering around waiting to speak to her. He’s brought the silver bowl of poison soup, which he makes clear Maomao is not to eat. Rather, he wants her to provide more insight about what happened. Enter Detective Maomao.

She dusts the bowl for fingerprints and discerns four separate sets, one of which was an outsider and thus the person who poisoned the soup. She also reveals, albeit through conjecture, to Gaoshun a system of sustained bullying of Lady Lishu by her own ladies-in-waiting.

Even if her taster hadn’t swapped bowls, the fact they all wore white and let Lishu wear a color that clashed with Gyokuyou made their feelings for her loud and clear. Yet Maomao still protected the taster, because she knows that taster didn’t understand what she was doing weighed against the value of her life.

Gaoshun thanks Maomao for her investigations and takes his report to a sleepless Jinshi who hasn’t even changed or removed a particularly important hairpin since the garden party. We see his “natural self” here, someone who’d rather laze about and whine than get shit done. Gaoshun knows this version of Jinshi well, since he’s been his attendant their whole lives.

Meanwhile, during her usual lunch with Xiaolan, Maomao learns that the four hairpins she received are no mere trinkets of favor: they are a form of currency that can be used to leave the Rear Palace, albeit temporarily, and with an escort. Surveying her hairpins, Maomao decides to reach out to the military officer Lihaku first.

When he gets a message from the Jade Pavilion lady-in-waiting, he immediately recalls she was the one making all the amorous faces while tasting poisoned soup. The hairpin was only meant to be obligation (like chocolate on Valentine’s Day); but he still decides to hear her out, even if he fully intends to turn her down.

The girl who meets with Lihaku doesn’t resemble the lady-in-waiting at the party at all; he makes two observations she’s heart many times before: that makeup completely changes her (though not in the way he thinks, as she uses it to hide her natural beauty) and she’s extremely bold for a young serving girl.

Maomao gets down to brass tacks: she wants to visit home, and Lihaku’s hairpin is her ticket out. That said, she offers something extremely valuable in exchange: not one or two but three letters of introduction from the Three Princesses of the Verdigris House—a brothel could claim a man of Lihaku’s rank’s yearly pay in a single night.

Lihaku thinks she’s having him on, so Maomao puts the screws to him, revealing she has other hairpins she can use to make the same offer to other men. Faced with this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Lihaku concedes defeat and agrees to escort her out of the palace.

The gift of hairpins is typically for courtship purposes, so Maomao’s fellow ladies and Gyokuyou think she’s being too naïve and blasé. Gyokuyou also uses the homecoming trip as a means of messing with Jinshi and amusing herself, as Maomao is already gone by the time Jinshi cleans himself up to visit her. Ladies gotta take small wins where they can in this world.

Lihaku dons his very best and hires a carriage for what is only a short trip to the red light district that could have been made on foot from the palace. While I knew Maomao lived in the imperial capital, I don’t think I realized just how damn close her home and father were, and yet how far away due to her status as an indentured servant.

That said, in ten months she was able to win passage out, and that’s pretty damn impressive for someone entirely devoid of ambition beyond finding new and exotic ways to poison herself. Upon arriving at the Verdigris House, she gets a punch to the gut from the old madame, as punishment for disappearing without a trace for so long.

That said, she did receive Maomao’s letter, and after a quick look at the young, muscular Lihaku, the madame has a servant whisk him away to meet with Pairain. We learn that Maomao is paying for a mere introduction, but with Lihaku’s physique and Pairan being Pairan, it might end up being more than that, so Madam will put the extra money on Maomao’s tab.

But having money doesn’t mean anything to Maomao. She’ll gladly give every penny to whoever if it means being able to walk through the door of her home and see her father again. He doesn’t seem the worse for wear, working the apothecary’s mortar and pestle as always.

There’s no melodrama to this reunion, just a ‘welcome home’ and a ‘glad you’re well’. That said, you can still feel the warmth and love and quintessential home-ness of this place. Maomao tells her father everything that’s happened in the last ten months, then hits they hay, planning to borrow a bath at the Verdigris tomorrow.

As she sleeps, her father considers her ending up at the palace to be a “twist of fate.” Between that, the fact he’s very old to be her biological father, there’s never been any mention of a mother, her hidden beauty, and that very evocative OP with a flower representing Maomao standing prominent among the others, it’s clear there are things Maomao doesn’t know about her lineage or destiny.

My theory? She was actually born in the inner palace, which made her kidnapping a return to her birthplace. She may even be of noble blood, but as she was a daughter born in a world where sons are preferred, she must’ve been cast out as a babe and then adopted. I find this all highly intriguing, even if she’s the last person to care about such things.